Sunday Post #89

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer ~ It's a chance to share news ~ A post to recap the past week on your blog, showcase books and things we have received and share new about what is coming up on our blog for the week ahead.

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The week has gone by in a flash. I like that when it comes to work. ;) What's helping make it faster? Audio Books! Yep. I've been listening to audio books all week at work. I've gotten through two books and half of a third. (which I CAN'T WAIT to get back to.)

BIG NEWS!
I got to listen to CHUCK WENDIG speak last night! Yes! He was at Seton Hill, a local university, speaking to the Writing Popular Fiction students. This was open to the public as well. So I went!

Chuck is as inspiring and funny as he is on his blog. Even better in person listening to him talk. He shared his journey to getting published, his years of writing things that are set aside and buried away. That his journey and everyone's journey for their book is different. He did share a few things that he's tell his younger self though, which was inspiring to hear.

I was thrilled to make this event as I got to meet friends and new people.

The first person I saw is one I've been talking books for many years. I chatted with him long before I started blogging thanks to Barnes & Nobles forums. It's Paul Goat Allen.

Then I meet several people. Authors Todd Moody and Rebecca Drake. Wonderful, kind people.

I also got the pleasure of meeting Jaye Wells. She's a kind woman. I was hoping she'd be there and she was! I took along with me four of my unsigned Sabina Kane books. :) I'm proud to say they are signed now.

I got to talk with Nicole Peeler, who I haven't seen in almost a year. Life has been happening for us both and haven't had time to catch up. So it was wonderful to see her and talk for a bit.

I had a picture taken with Nicole and Jaye. Thank you ladies! And look who the photo bomber is!! Yep, Chuck himself! I think that's one of the best photo bombs I've ever had.

But before that photo bomb I did get to meet Chuck and have him autograph my copy of Blackbirds (where he predicts my demise). He is a great person.

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The Fit Booker:

Goal:  Workout in any form of exercise (or on Wii Fit) 2x's a week. (to feel better and hope to drop a few pants sizes)

How did I do last week... I got one day of push mowing the grass. (I think this is more than enough for one day of exercise.) And, surprise, surprise! I got on the treadmill for 40 minutes! Woot woot! Two days down. I jogged/fast walked about 2.7 miles. Sweet! And to top it off, I did 20 jack knives too. I feel good about this week.

Zombie Run app:
Season 1 Mission 2:
I was to divert the zombies while they fixed the gates as they were stuck.

It's fun to add this app with my Spotify of workout music. They come in every so often and talk. It's like a little community that I just can't talk to. lol. But when they say to speed up, I do try to speed up (for a minute or two as that's all I can handle, and it's not that much faster). It's something to take my mind off the dreaded jog.

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What's Happening in Books:

Current Read:

Dirty Magic: New Orleans edited by Charlie Brown


Current Audiobook:
Chasing the Star Garden by Melanie Karsak

Current Podcast Book Listen:
The Horde by Patrick Scaffido

Finished Last Week: 

Dirty Magic: New Orleans edited by Charlie Brown

Audiobooks from Audible:

From Gods by Mary Ting
The Harvesting by Melanie Karsak

Finished Podcast Book Listen:

I've been listening to Audible books.

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Last Week on the Blog:

Cover Reveals: (click titles to go to post & learn more)

Posts:

Around the Internet...


Reviews:

Witch for Hire by N.E. Conneely

Ghost Light by E.J. Stevens

Podcast Review:

Mama Bitchstress Reviews:

GIVEAWAYS:

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This Week to Come on the Blog:

Two reviews are scheduled for next week:
  From Gods
  The Harvesting

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Received Last Weeks:

Review & Review Consideration:

Audio Books Requested for Review:

Chasing the Star Garden by Melanie Karsak
Goodreads Synopsis:
An opium-addicted beauty.
An infamous poet living in self-imposed exile.
An ancient treasure about to fall into the wrong hands.

Melanie Karsak's Chasing the Star Garden takes readers on a thrilling adventure from the gritty opium dens of gaslamp London to the gem-colored waters of the ancient world. Lily Stargazer, a loveable but reckless airship racer with a famous lover and shattered past, reluctantly plunges into a centuries-old mystery in a romantic adventure best described as Dan Brown meets Mary Shelley.

It all begins on one of the worst days of Lily’s life. She just lost the London leg of the 1823 Airship Grand Prix. To top it off, a harlequin fleeing from constables shoved a kaleidoscope down her pants, told her to fly to Venice, then threw himself from her airship tower. What’s a girl to do? For Lily, the answer is easy: drink absinthe and smoke opium. 

Lily’s lover, Lord Byron, encourages her to make the trip to Venice. Lily soon finds herself at the heart of an ancient mystery which has her running from her past and chasing true love and the stars along the way.

*Due to steamy scenes and depictions of drug use, this novel is intended for mature readers.

Purchased/Winnings/Gifts:

Won:

Free Ebooks:

PDF

Midway by Melanie Karsak
Goodreads Synopsis:
Midway: A Harvesting Series Novella (Book 1.5 in The Harvesting Series) is a tie-in novella that compliments The Harvesting, Book I in The Harvesting Series. 

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for the beginning of the end. 

Carnie. Ride jockey. Roustabout. White trash. Tilt girl. Gypsy. Cricket has been called a lot of things, but she never thought survivor of the zombie apocalypse would be one of them. One day she’s barking on the midway, and the next day, the world is eating itself alive. 

Cricket, along with Vella, a tarot reader, and Puck, Cricket’s mangy mutt, find themselves running for their lives, but where can you hide when mankind has fallen? Cricket will need help if she hopes to survive. 

Luckily for her, we were never really alone, and apparently, magical forces want to keep this tilt girl alive.


(On my Kindle App)

(On my Nook)

Free Audio Books/Stories:

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Reviews to Come:

Soulless by Skyla Dawn Cameron

The Sentinel by Chris Lester

The Muse by Chris Lester
Metamor City: Making the Cut by Chris Lester
Metamor City: Whispers in the Wood by Chris Lester

Danube Waves by Katharina Bordet

Rhune by Michael J. Sullivan

Heartstealer by K.T. Bryski

Lex Talionis by Starla Huchton
7th Son: 7 Days anthology by J.C. Hutchins

House of Grey 6 by Collin Earl
The Secret World Chronicle: World Divided by Mercedes Lackey, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee, Veronica Giguere
The Secret World Chronicle: Waiting On by Mercedes Lackey, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee, Veronica Giguere
The Secret World Chronicle: Revolutions by Mercedes Lackey, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee, Veronica Giguere
Heir to Kale by K.L. Bone

Tales from the Archives Vol. 4: #2 The Mummy of Barnsley

Tales from the Archives Vol. 4: #3 The Black Empress
Into Thin Air by Val Griswold-Ford
The Hidden Institute by Brand Gamblin

Club Nexus by E.J. Stevens (Audiobook)

From Gods by Mary Ting (Audiobook)

The Harvesting by Melanie Karsak (Audiobook)

Dirty Magic: New Orleans edited by Charlie Brown

Book Review: Blackbirds

Blackbirds

By Chuck Wendig

Format: ebook

Genre: urban fantasy/paranormal/cursing as an art form (shut up, it is too a genre)

Series: Miriam Black #1

Recommendation: Stop reading this review. Go get the book. Just don’t even argue.

Synopsis: Miriam Black knows when you will die.

Still in her early twenties, she's foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days Louis will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name.

Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But Louis will die because he met her, and she will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can't save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she'll have to try.

First Sentence:  Car lights strobe through busted motel blinds.

Purchase at:  B&N, Amazon, Book Depository, Indiebound, Powells

My Thoughts and Summary: I read this book...in 2012 some time, but decided to reread the first two books in preparation to read the third, and thought it would be a good time to review them for Mel’s blog.

I am sitting here, having read the book twice, and struggling even where to start with how much I love this character, this world, this book, and everything.

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die and she’ll probably come by and pick your corpse after you kick it. She’s a self-identified vulture, who drifts from person to person, living on the road and in motel rooms. She swears. She smokes. She drinks. She has sex. She’s darkly damaged, carrying around the weight of her past and her “curse”. She redefines cankerous. And she is fantastic.

Though Miriam is the star, she is not alone--a cast of characters join her, both villains and heroes...er...hero. Let's face it, this is a dark world, and as such, the supporting cast are also dark. A fellow conman, some sadistic killers. The one bright spot of light is Louis Darling, the truck driver Miriam knows will die in a month's time from when she meets him--die in a grisly fashion, speaking her name. He's a good guy in a dark world--he even says things like heck, which I find terribly endearing in this instance. The supporting characters in the book are integral to the plot while feeling entirely organic to the story.

Blackbirds is tightly plotted and paced, moving at just the right speed--there is room to catch your breath, but you're pulled right back in again. I'm one of those people you can't watch a movie with because, like Miriam, I know how it's gonna end--but with this book, as well as the others in the series, I can never entirely predict how things will go. There are plot twists and points I suspect might be coming, but nothing feels safe--anyone could go, anything could happen, and that is the best kind of feeling for me when reading a book.

What makes this a real standout first book as well is that it's not really an origin story. We glimpse Miriam's origins, to be sure, through her dreams and flashbacks in interludes, piecing together her past and how her powers work at the right moments to fit with the main narrative, but at this point, Miriam knows who she is and knows what she can do. She embraces.

(Or she thinks she does. That's all I'll say about that, but Wendig masterfully lays out this world and then zooms out just enough that the reader--and Miriam--realizes there are more layers than immediately apparent.)

The humor in Blackbirds, when present, is dark and razor-sharp, and the novel is peppered with uniquely Wendig turns of phrase. Often naughty ones. The voice is part of the book's appeal, to be sure.

I feel like I'm being vague here, talking in broad strokes, but there is so much here I don't want to give away, ESPECIALLY since I've also read the next two books. So expect a little more in the next two reviews. I will say, my favourite thing in the book might be Harriet's Story. The first one. You'll know what I'm talking about if you've read it.

One thing I told myself I wouldn’t do in reviewing books is to, basically, review other people’s reviews of the books—it is not my place to criticize and it’s all just opinions. But like I did in addressing some of the religious objections to The Blood Gospel, I’m going to do it here because I think it’s relevant. One of the criticisms I’ve seen lobbed at Blackbirds a couple of places over the years is that it is “clearly” a book about a woman written by a man, that it is somehow not...feminine enough? Or something? That it just doesn’t read authentically as a woman’s POV? Or that things are just sort of gendered and this is clearly a “boy” kind of thing. (Can you tell this baffles me?)

Look, I have lady bits. They came with this body. And the double-X in my DNA. I’m a hetero, cis-gender female. I am typing this with a Disney Princess Band-Aid on my finger. I have a pink tiara Scentsy burner. I sing "I Dreamed a Dream" while I wash dishes. I AM A GIRL, not just according to my birth certificate but by the standards of this cultural construct known as gender.

And I love Miriam Black.

I can identify with many aspects of Miriam. I get her. Male writers unable to write believable female protagonists is not a new criticism—it is one I have been vocal about many times—and it's often valid, but that is not the case here. Miriam may not be everyone’s kind of female character, but she is entirely authentic (especially if you’ve ever worked a blue collar job on the nightshift with women, who are just as crude as men are). Wendig has written a better rounded, more realistic heroine than a number of female writers I can think of; the man knows what he’s doing and he gets his character. Miriam is abrasive and damaged and cut with sharp edges, but you can be damn sure I know a fuck-ton of women who are just like that. Some of them say fuck-ton. 

So. Cis-gender ladies with vajajays and pink nail polish and Legally Blonde on DVD: do not dismiss this book without having tried it. I’m not gonna lie—it’s gory and violent and the language is crass. But if you’re the kind of chick who digs Tarantino films, you will appreciate Blackbirds and Miriam Black.

Bitchstress Bechdel Bonus: Does it pass the Bechdel Test? Guys...I wasn’t paying attention. Do I have to turn in my feminist cred now?

Disclaimer: I know the author on Twitter but purchased the book for my own enjoyment and familiarity with the author did not impact my review.

Teaser Tuesday (174)

Teaser Tuesday

is a weekly event 

Sponsored by MizB of Should be Reading 

Here's how it works: Grab the book you are currently reading (anything at all) 

Open the book to any random page. 

Share 2 teaser sentences from anywhere on the page 

Please Make Sure They Are Not Spoilers! 

(Don't Give Too Much Away) 

Just enough to pique our interests 

Mama Bitchstress's Read:

 

Following behind is a thin slip of a man, skin so pale it might as well be gray, sliding along with all the posture of a broken coatrack. A black V-neck T-shirt hangs loose over his sickly frame--his matchstick arms are inked with symbols and sigils, ones Mookie's seen but can't place, ones that tell him right away what he's looking at even without blazing.

The Blue Blazes

By Chuck Wendig